Perhaps no other American city is so defined by an indigenous architectural style as Baltimore is by the rowhouse, whose brick facades march up and down the gentle hills of the city. Why did the rowhouse thrive in Baltimore? How did it escape destruction here, unlike in many other historic American cities? What were the forces that led to the citywide renovation of Baltimore's rowhouses? The Baltimore Rowhouse tells the fascinating 200-year story of this building type. It chronicles the evolution of the rowhouse from its origins as speculative housing for immigrants, through its reclamation and renovation by young urban pioneers thanks to local government sponsorship, to its current occupation by a new cadre of wealthy professionals.

The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff, which is available for the first time in the United States, is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of four hundred years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few. The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered--the row house--which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world's great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600s to today as the author theorizes, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay, and the worst catastrophes of global climate change.

Winner, 2009 Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize. Vernacular Architecture Forum This pioneering study explains how one of America’s important early cities responded to the challenge of housing its poorer citizens. Where and how did the working poor live? How did builders and developers provide reasonably priced housing for lower-income groups during the city's growth? Having studied over 3,000 surviving alley houses in Baltimore through extensive land records and census research, Mary Ellen Hayward systematically reconstructs the lives, households, and neighborhoods that once thrived on the city's narrowest streets. In the past, these neighborhoods were sometimes referred to as "dilapidated," "blighted," or "poverty stricken." In Baltimore's Alley Houses, Hayward reveals the rich cultural and ethnic traditions that formed the African-American and immigrant Irish, German, Bohemian, and Polish communities that made their homes on the city's alley streets. Featuring more than one hundred historic images, Baltimore's Alley Houses documents the changing architectural styles of low-income housing over two centuries and reveals the complex lives of its residents.

This innovative study of racial upheaval and urban transformation in Baltimore, Maryland investigates the impact of "blockbusting"—a practice in which real estate agents would sell a house on an all-white block to an African American family with the aim of igniting a panic among the other residents. These homeowners would often sell at a loss to move away, and the real estate agents would promote the properties at a drastic markup to African American buyers. In this groundbreaking book, W. Edward Orser examines Edmondson Village, a west Baltimore rowhouse community where an especially acute instance of blockbusting triggered white flight and racial change on a dramatic scale. Between 1955 and 1965, nearly twenty thousand white residents, who saw their secure world changing drastically, were replaced by blacks in search of the American dream. By buying low and selling high, playing on the fears of whites and the needs of African Americans, blockbusters set off a series of events that Orser calls "a collective trauma whose significance for recent American social and cultural history is still insufficiently appreciated and understood." Blockbusting in Baltimore describes a widely experienced but little analyzed phenomenon of recent social history. Orser makes an important contribution to community and urban studies, race relations, and records of the African American experience.

Romantic stylings follow excursions into the Greek and Gothic Revivals, the rise of the popular Italianate-mode for town and country houses : fine examples of soaring church spires; public spaces like the Peabody Library, and masterpieces of ornamented dignity."

Fictionalized memoir which explores the dynamics of being raised in a declining Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Pint-sized and four-eyed, little Jimmy Morris is near the bottom of the food chain in his working class "streetcar suburb" of Kings Cross. He's a dreamer, schemer, schoolyard scrapper, secret lover of books, and classroom clown ... a kid you can't decide whether to hug or to slap. Meanwhile, the conformity of the 1950s is yielding to those turbulent '60s. Yes, the times they definitely were a changin' with Kings Cross in the eye of the societal storm.